[SOLVED] Using a hard drive to migrate VM images

[matthei]

I'm upgrading my SSD, most of the VM images are on a secondary SSD, but the new installation of Proxmox doesn't show any files.

Old SSD was a 256GB with Proxmox 7.0 installed.
The secondary SSD that holds all VM virtual disk images is a 512GB, with one partition, added as a Directory. (mounted as /mnt/ssd500)
New SSD is a 2TB nvme, I've installed proxmox 7.2.

I've removed the old SSD, and added the new. Installed fresh Proxmox 7.2.
My plan was that I'd just be able to copy the VM conf files (e.g. 101.conf) and that the VM images would come from the secondary disk, as they have so far.
But when running on the new 2TB nvme drive (with the fresh proxmox install), I go in the Web Interface, under Storage tab, the "ssd500" is listed there, but has no images or anything.
Using ssh to check that directory ("cd /mnt/ssd500" and then doing "ls" shows "dump, images, lost+found... etc" but the "images" directory is empty.

For a moment I got completely scared, and thought that the new installation re-initialized the drive, wiping everything I had. But when removing the new SSD, putting the old one in, everything is working as it used to. And when i go into "cd /mnt/ssd500/images/101" i see all the VM disks there, like they should be.

Why is this happening?
I am currently migrating the virtual disk files by copying them over the network, which is about 5x slower than using SSDs inside the same machine.



Oh, what's weird is that I don't think i added the /mnt/ssd500 to the fstab. It just appeared under storage. Perhaps is it, that during proxmox installation, it scans attached drives for existing proxmox storage?

 

[shrdlicka]

That sounds a bit weird. Are you sure that the right partition was mounted?

 

[VictorSTS]

The right way to do this would be make a backup of your VMs from your "old" Proxmox and restore them in the "new" Proxmox.

 

[fabian]

check the storage.cfg (old and new) and check whether the dir is correctly mounted (you might want to set "is_mountpoint" in storage.cfg so that the storage is only treated as active if something's mounted there).

 

[matthei]

Thanks all, I just found the time to continue tinkering with this. At the time, I've just transfered the VMs by backing them up, then restoring them on the new installation (as it should be done).

Yes, it wasn't mounted. That's all there is to it basically.

But i'm a bit curious why the new fresh installation has picked it up and added it as storage. I don't remember exactly, but I think that this 500GB SSD (used for VM images on the old installation) was plugged in when I was installing the new Proxmox on the 2TB nvme. Is it possible that during proxmox installation, it searches for storage devices and adds them to storage? How did it know how it was named? Does it use the drive's label as storage name?
(Just curious so I understand how all these things work, but the problem is solved).

 

[fabian]

no, there is no auto-detection of storages whatsoever, neither at install time nor later.

 

[matthei]

no, there is no auto-detection of storages whatsoever, neither at install time nor later.

OK, good to know!